why do viruses try to kill the thing keeping them alive?
In: Biology
Viruses are usually most deadly immediately after they have jumped to a new species. They will then tend to evolve to become less virulent, because as you say they want to keep you alive to spread.
We’ve seen many examples of this happening, the HIV virus has become slower to cause AIDS which combined with newer treatments has made it much less deadly. Even early variants of COVID-19 were less deadly than later variants like Omicron (although it still remained more deadly than the flu virus).
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